I've wanted a Roomba for a while, mostly because I want to own a robot, and it couldn't hurt. But now, apparently, I also need a cat:

Burnt Orange Report dug up Obama's announcement from 1/16/2007 that he was going to form an exploratory committee and think about maybe running for President. That got me wondering, so I dug up the text of Bush's announcement on 3/7/1999. It's interesting to compare what Bush said back then to how things turned out. I'll have to remember to virtuablog or whatever we're calling it in 8 years, comparing Obama's speech to how things turned out. He's done a good job so far of sticking with the same message, but who knows what might happen over the next 8 years. I mean, who other than James Dobson.

"During the interview, Wozniak also indicated that he isn’t that excited with the iPhone. "Consumers aren't getting all they want when companies are very proprietary and lock their products down," he told the Telegraph."

It's a bit different, though; the Woz hasn't been part of Apple since 1987. Jobs saying Apple screwed up might lose him some cult followers. And I can't say that I think they've screwed up, per se, since "iPod" is a common term for "mp3 player," even though it was neither the first nor the best. Apple has definitely figured something out. We'll see what happens as Android gets bigger, though, especially once IT supports Flash, and perhaps people start developing web apps for it that WOULD work on iPhones if Apple wasn't locked into their content model.

Die: I'm a master skimmer. I use "mark all items as read" quite often in Reader, after digging through and finding the few headlines that stand out. I picked up that mostly bad habit while editing my college newspaper; if the headline doesn't make you want to read the article--particularly in a format like a blog, where the writer of the article also wrote the headline--the article likely isn't worth reading. It doesn't hurt that PZ's been traveling a lot lately, keeping the reading down.

Looking at my Google Reader Trends (and then getting obsessive about it, as I'm wont to do, and making a spreadsheet to sort out the data completely), though, I was wrong about a lot of that. Looks like I've read roughly 60% of the articles that came in on my feeds in the last month, and shared about 10% of what I've read. It's hard to judge exactly, though, because a friend's blog blew up and spat out over 2000 empty stories last week, all of which I marked as read, and that kinda threw my trends for loop.

Me too, but I suspect we use the term differently. I've probably mentioned before that I'm (afaik) the oldest competing skimmer (ie. skimboarder) in America. I just competed in Bradenton a couple of months ago. Didn't win but had fun.